Radical Self-Acceptance

According to Dr. Tara Brach, feelings of shame and unworthiness are the source of many problems we experience with our relationships, careers, creative endeavors, and most fundamentally, our spiritual unfolding. On Radical Self-Acceptance, this respected clinical psychologist and Buddhist meditation teacher shows you how to free yourself from the grip of your insecurities about being "good enough."

Meditations for Emotional Healing: Finding Freedom in the Face of Difficulty

Despite our best intentions, we often have trouble dealing effectively with strong emotions. What if you had a conscious, skillful way to respond in times of anger, fear, jealousy, shame, and other powerful emotions? Meditations for Emotional Healing gives us a collection of insights and practices for bringing compassion, clarity, and understanding to our emotional lives-instead of expressing or repressing them in unhealthy ways.

Finding True Refuge: Meditations for Difficult Times

When the difficulties and losses of life feel overwhelming, is there someplace we can turn for the safety, nurturing, and peace that we long for? Most of us are strongly conditioned to react with fear and confusion, falling back on strategies of judgment, control, addictive behaviors, and anger. Yet there is another way. “In any moment, no matter how lost we feel, we can take refuge in presence and love,” teaches Tara Brach.

Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

"Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering," says Tara Brach at the start of this illuminating book. This suffering emerges in crippling self-judgments and conflicts in our relationships, in addictions and perfectionism, in loneliness and overwork - all the forces that keep our lives constricted and unfulfilled. Radical Acceptance offers a path to freedom, including the day-to-day practical guidance developed over Dr. Brach's 20 years of work with therapy clients and Buddhist students.

True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart

How do you cope when facing life-threatening illness, family conflict, faltering relationships, old trauma, obsessive thinking, overwhelming emotion, or inevitable loss? If you're like most people, chances are you react with fear and confusion, falling back on timeworn strategies: anger, self-judgment, and addictive behaviors. Though these old, conditioned attempts to control our life may offer fleeting relief, ultimately they leave us feeling isolated and mired in pain. There is another way.

A profound transformation can occur just by training your attention in awareness - a practice sweeping schools, workplaces, and institutions across the country with its capacity to decrease stress, cultivate inner calm, and expand wisdom and creativity. Clinical psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach has been at the forefront of mindfulness-based therapy since its inception, successfully bringing principles of mindfulness to alleviate depression, chronic pain, and more.

Meditation and Psychotherapy: A Professional Training Course for Integrating Mindfulness into Clinical Practice

Healing is coming home to one's own authentic self - to the loving presence that is the ground of our being. But we often get trapped by the false refuges of fear-based habits and judgmental thoughts. Created for mental health professionals and illuminating to anyone interested in the core techniques, practices and insights of Buddhist psychology, this experience-focused audio-learning program helps us find our way back to natural presence, a place where peace and our deep love for life grows.

Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender

Letting Go describes a simple and effective means by which to let go of the obstacles to enlightenment and become free of negativity. During the many decades of the author's clinical psychiatric practice, the primary aim was to seek the most effective ways to relieve human suffering in all of its many forms. The inner mechanism of surrender was found to be of great practical benefit and is described in this book.

On Getting Unstuck, Pema Chodron introduces a rare Tibetan teaching she received from her teacher, Dzigar Kontrul Rinpoche, and one that has become critical to her practice. Here, she unveils the mystery of an ineffable quality; a "pre-emotional" feeling that arises in us, brings us discomfort, and causes us to react by escaping the discomfort, often with harmful habits. With Getting Unstuck, she offers us a first look at "both the itch and the scratch": what Tibetan Buddhists call shenpa.

Waking Up brings you the insights of 34 of today's leading authors and teachers who have deeply explored the implications of spiritual awakening. Sounds True publisher Tami Simon will speak with the teachers about their personal understandings of awakening - how it happened, what changed (and what didn't), and how their experiences can inspire and inform our own realizations.

Walking the Walk: Putting the Teachings into Practice When It Matters Most

It's one thing to hear a life-changing truth or to have a conceptual grasp on spiritual wisdom. But it’s another thing to "walk the walk" - or to put into practice the good advice we've been given. What does it mean to walk the walk in our everyday lives? According to Pema Chödrön, it means being down-to-earth, genuine, and perhaps most importantly, it means engaging in the teachings in order to actively confront anything and everything we’ve heretofore rejected in our attempts to find happiness.

Self-Compassion Step by Step: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself

Why does it feel so natural to be compassionate and kind to those we care about - yet so hard to treat ourselves the same way? "Our culture teaches us to use self-criticism for motivation and to build self-esteem by constantly measuring ourselves against everyone else," says Dr. Kristin Neff. "We need to re-learn the essential skill of being genuinely nurturing and supportive toward ourselves."

When Pain is the Doorway: Awakening in the Most Difficult Circumstances

What if the full sense of our aliveness were only to be found amidst our most challenging times and difficult experiences? In pain and crisis, teaches Pema Chödrön, there lies a hidden doorway to freedom that appears to us only when we're sure that there is no way out. In these intimate audio learning sessions, Pema Chödrön helps us distinguish the triggers or external events that we blame for our suffering from the deeper habitual patterns that feed our anger, fear, or sadness.

Unconditional Confidence

Pema Chodron is one of today's leading meditation teachers. With more than one million books sold to date, she draws sold out crowds across the U.S. and Canada. On Unconditional Confidence, she offers two accessible sessions to help anyone find courage in times of challenge and change.

Living with Your Heart Wide Open: How Mindfulness and Compassion Can Free You from Unworthiness, Inadequacy, and Shame

The way we talk to ourselves is often unkind and filled with self-judgments. These overly harsh self-criticisms can make us feel unworthy and incomplete. What if what you really need is not higher standards for yourself, but greater self-compassion? In Living with Your Heart Wide Open, you'll discover how mindfulness and self-compassion can free you from the thoughts and beliefs that create feelings of inadequacy.

Coming Closer to Ourselves: Making Everything the Path of Awakening

In challenging times, why do so many of us turn to Pema Chödrön for guidance? Many say that it’s her honest and caring way of communicating the core teachings of Buddhism - not just conceptually, but directly from her heart to ours. In these inspiring sessions, she teaches us how to give that compassion to the person we neglect most often - ourselves.

Men, Women and Worthiness: The Experience of Shame and the Power of Being Enough

What does it take to be secure in our sense of belonging and self-worth? We may hustle to attain this security through achievements, meeting expectations, or repeating affirmations to ourselves - but Dr. Brené Brown's research has shown there is ultimately one obstacle to our sense of worthiness. “Shame is the barrier,” she teaches, “and building shame resilience is how we overcome it.”

Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind

The relentless pursuit of high self-esteem has become a virtual religion - and a tyrannical one at that. Our ultracompetitive culture tells us we need to be constantly above average to feel good about ourselves, but there is always someone more attractive, successful, or intelligent than we are. And even when we do manage to grab hold of high self-esteem for a brief moment, we can't seem to keep it. Our sense of self-worth goes up and down like a ping-pong ball, rising and falling in lockstep with our latest success or failure.

The Truth of Our Existence: Four Teachings from the Buddha to Illuminate Your Life

What would happen if we looked with fresh eyes at the struggles and "impossible situations" that we face every day - and found there four gifts that changed everything? For decades, Pema Chödrön has brought clarity and heart to the core teachings of the Buddha, helping to make them relevant and useful in our everyday lives. With The Truth of Our Existence, she immerses us in one of Buddhism’s essential distillations of written wisdom known as The Four Marks of Existence.

Publisher's Summary

The Practice of Self-Acceptance, Taught by a Buddhist Clinical Psychologist...

How would your life change if you genuinely accepted yourself, just the way you are? According to Dr. Tara Brach, feelings of shame and unworthiness are the source of many problems we experience with our relationships, careers, creative endeavors, and most fundamentally, our spiritual unfolding.

On Radical Self-Acceptance, this respected clinical psychologist and Buddhist meditation teacher shows you how to free yourself from the grip of your insecurities about being "good enough." With insights from both Eastern contemplative traditions and Western psychotherapies, Dr. Brach guides you through a full program of meditations and skills you need to become more compassionate toward the "unforgivable" parts of your self.

As Dr. Brach says, the most difficult - and pervasive - challenge to Westerners today is the suffering caused by our feelings of unworthiness and self-aversion. Radical Self-Acceptance offers a way to break out of this emotional prison, so you can discover the freedom that comes with kindness and true appreciation of yourself and others.

It is one of the best things I have done for myself. This audiobook helped me to understand my (strong negative) emotional reactions, to accept them and to "deal" with them.

What did you like best about this story?

Tara Brach is right on point describing the issues with and ways to self-acceptance. She breaks down our mislead thinking and behaviour and gives many examples for easy understanding. Short guided meditations help to deepen awareness of our emotions and to accept us as we are.

What about Tara Brach’s performance did you like?

Tara Brach's voice is soft and her speech flow is natural. It is easy to follow. She gives you time to reflect.

Tara Brach is an excellent teacher. She takes her years of experience and applies her psychological training to give you a very Western friendly approach to dealing with your self. The title is no lie, it is fundamentally a guide to accepting yourself with all your problems and short comings.

Would you consider the audio edition of Radical Self-Acceptance to be better than the print version?

This is the best self-help item I've used. SO relaxing, validating, and useful. I am thrilled that I bought this and that I get myself to listen to this over and over again. I recommend getting the audible of her book, too, but this is a shorter thing to do if you don't want all that is in the book.

What did you like best about this story?

Successfully worked me through radical self-acceptance -- and without a therapist, which is pretty impressive.

How pleased I am to discover the work of Tara Brach on Audible. Her words are truly life changing. I try to begin every day listening to some of this book and have found it not only uplifting and inspiring but a huge help in understanding myself and in practising self compassion.

6 of 6 people found this review helpful

jane

5/17/15

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Performance

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"So much good content, structured a little randomly"

This book has great content and so so many great teachings within. I found it a bit fast paced ... By that I mean so many poems, quotes, stories etc were coming at you, I think I'd need to listen / read more than once to take it all in.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Ms. H. Greenfield

2/5/15

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Performance

Story

"Many thx"

Wonderful I love all of Tara brachs books so much wisdom highly recommended reading everyone should read her books thank you Tara

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

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